Cosmetics of Food

When we make our lunch, we seldom think of dressing up the food to make it look "nice". When a busy housewife/mother puts food on the table for dinner, she seldom thinks of how "pretty" the meal is. Yet cooks in restaurants usually decorate dishes with sprigs of parsley or watercress or a sprinkle of paprika for color. Spending time on on the appearance of food is cosmetics. It is in this light that I would like to discuss the cosmetics of food. I would like to write about food which has only cosmetic value as distinct from food which has only nutritional value. This is an artificial distinction, of course, since food can be both nutritional and cosmetic at the same time. Currently there is a lot of corporately manufactured "food" which is only cosmetic. How did it get that way?

First , let us look at the standard American cookbook. Full of pretty pictures of a well set dinner table. That's cosmetics. Betty Crocker, a corporate entity and not a person, always has pretty pictures in her cookbook. In 40 years of experience with this cook book, I do not recall one comment about nutrition: no vitamins, no proteins or description of health. There may be some, but comments on nutrition are rare.

So also are Fanny Farmer and the Boston Cooking School Cookbook. These books were written in the days of 'Finishing Schools' for young ladies and for the purpose of getting together small dinner parties for friends once a week and having a 'well set' table. These cookbooks are very different from health food cookbooks in many ways.

Where did these cookbooks come from? I think they were originally designed for upper middle-class 'ladies' who were playing the game "My table is prettier than your table." These 'ladies' were busy imitating European nobility who hired chefs and had almost nightly banquets of fancy food and delicacies from far off lands. The nobility were very careful to have their tables prettier than anyone else's table.

Some of the most famous and widely imitated chefs were those of the Bourbon kings of France. Great banquets were the fashion then and the culinary masterpieces were very decorative. One of our greatest cookbooks, Larouse's Gastronomique, is an encyclopedia of recipes first used by the chefs to the French nobility. The dishes were beautiful and occasionally nutritious but the meals were seldom part of a balanced diet.

A few years ago, I wanted to know more about 'blanc mange' - a sort of pudding made from flour. Looking through Larousse I found that 'blanc mange' was originally made with yellow millet flour. Millet flour was stirred into boiling water, cooked a bit then poured into a fancy mould, allowed to cool until it became paste (technically: alimentary paste). Invert the mould on a plate, pour jelly over the 'blanc mange' and serve. Another 'blanc mange' is made when a pot of oatmeal is allowed to cool and solidify.

What does this have to do with cosmetics? Everything. The chef likes his job so he/she cooks the food the king likes. The king knows nothing of nutritional science so he judges food by cosmetics/appearance. So the chef cooks 'pretty' dishes to please the king/queen and get a nice raise in salary. The chef refuses fresh ground whole wheat or millet flour with its dirty brown look, complaining that it is peasant food. He buys bleached white flour so the kings table looks pretty. He also buys maraschino cherries (remember red dye #2?), fruit without ugly blemishes (poisoned by insecticides), carefully preserved dried fruit (preserved with sulfur dioxide), white sugar for frosting (the first chemical substitute for food), oranges during winter (when they cause colds and flus), bananas (a tropical fruit which caused diarrhea among temperate climate people when they were introduced) and all sorts of rare and exotic foods from far away places. Wonderbread had its origins in French pastry.

This may sound ridiculous at first reading but remember Marie Antoinette's comment when she saw the starving people of Paris waiting in long lines for bread: "Why don't they eat cake?" She was a Princess and a Queen and didn't know that the peasants didn't ever have cake. Nobility are ignorant of reality among us peasants.

The modern American socialite wants to have a pretty table so the agri-food-business gives her pretty frozen cheesecakes, attractive frozen pizza, delicate Twinkies with pretty colored sugar over it all. It sells. We buy it. We in America want to live like kings. Cancer is our price for this snobbery.

At the restaurant, parsley is for decoration, seldom eaten. Watercress looks pretty but it is too bitter for those who have "delicate" taste buds.

I put the parsley in my omelet not around it. It tastes good and has lots of B vitamins. Watercress goes into my salad, not to 'garnish' it. Paprika is a flavor and a nutrient herb, not a cosmetic powder.

Dan White, who murdered two people in broad daylight (Muscony and Harvey Milk in the early 1980's), pleaded insanity because of eating Twinkies . That was ridiculous! But it was also a prophecy: artificial food will drive you crazy in a very real way. And the agri-food-business will glad to make a profit selling it to you. All you have to do to discover this for yourself is to read the list of ingredients from the bottom up and discover how much stuff in the box is phony. If you can't pronounce the name or if it is initials only, it is not food. Food words are simple and everyone knows what they are. The strange ingredients are usually poison or chemical colors.

I like delicious French pastries too, now and then, for gustatory amusement. They really taste delicious, But they are always made with dead things: white flour, hydrogenated vegetable shortening, white sugar, artificial flavor and so forth, and so forth and so forth....

When I want something delicious and nutritious, I use real food. I grind my wheat, rye and buckwheat flour fresh to make bread. Add fresh herbs and honey and make myself a poor man's bread: coarse, heavy flavored, dense and delicious. No one has ever refused a second slice. Especially when is hot from the oven.

With watercress in a sandwich, it becomes a delicious lunch, the watercress protruding from between the slices of peasant bread. To my tongue and eye, the lunch is beautiful.

(Written 1986)